Spaying and neutering clearly has many benefits for our animal friends. Besides sparing them a preoccupation with sex, it supposedly helps them live longer, healthier lives. Now I know this next question is going blow your mind. But what benefits could it have for humans?
I am not saying it should be forcibly put into practice. But, hey, if someone wants to do it voluntarily, who am I to stop them?
Of course, humans are a little different than dogs and cats. Humans have year-round mating, for example. But still, it must have some effect, positive (or negative).
[Jim B.]
Now, that is the part for Cecil Adams. Now what do the rest of you have to say, my brethren on these boards?
You’re making an assumption that it is better for the health of the animals. I’m not sure that is the case. It is best not to have an overpopulation of dogs and cats, but that is not the same thing as benefitting the health of the individual animal. Organizations that encourage the spaying and neutering of animals (which is good) will have a tendency to present it as better for the health of the animals than it might in fact be.
We do know that men who have been castrated tend to live ten to fifteen years longer than men who have not, which suggests that overall there are health benefits to the procedure (if we accept lifespan as a proxy for good health).
I don’t know if similar effects for women who have been surgically sterilised have been observed. In the case of women, you’d need to filter out the health effects of pregnancy and childbirth, and compare a population of sterilised women with a population of women who had not been sterilised, but who nevertheless had never become pregnant.
In much the way you’d expect - by looking at populations of castrated men, and comparing them with populations of men not castrated.
“Where”, I hear you cry, “are we to find a population of castrated men?” We do have records that we can look at, both from various oriental courts up to the nineteenth century and, disturbingly, from western institutions for the mentally afflicted up to the twentieth century.
Yes. But presumably their life expectancy reflects the net outcome of both the positive and negative consequences of castration. Despite being at greater risk of osteoporosis (and presumably having a higher incidence of it) the castrated men lived longer.
I seem to recall a passage in Patrick O’ Brian’s “Aubrey / Maturin” novels of naval life 200 years ago: where Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, feels exasperated at the high incidence of venereal disease among the crew; and lyrically muses aloud to said crewmen about the benefits and advantages of castration, especially to the castratee. Admittedly Maturin is, in general, a bit odd.
Yes, but you have to also have to consider that Court eunachs (i.e. the vast majority of those whose life records survive) would by nature of their reletive better access to health care and above average standard of living be expected to live longer than a farmhand. You also have to consider how many boy’s survived the procedure to begin with, many did not.
When you base your claims on records from ancient oriental courts (assuming the information is accurate) you’re mixing together numerous other variables that complicate matters. Who were the men selected for castration? Why were they selected? How were their lives different after castration than the average man of the time?
Not very convincing, if you ask me. Leaving aside the supposed various oriental records (got any cites?), trying to say the only possible cause between the length of men’s lives in and out of mental institutions before the start of the twentieth century was the fact that those that were institutionalized were castrated needs a lot more backup than just your sayso…if indeed such a supposed benefit actually took place at all.
I remember a friend of mine going to see a doctor during puberty because he was suffering from early onset male pattern baldness. The doctor told him the only way to stop it would be to cut his balls off.
Most of the data comes from looking at institutionalized men and comparing the lifespan of men who had been castrated with men who had not. An institutionalized population has the advantage of being somewhat less variable than the general population with regard to lifestyle.
A study of Korean eunuchsalso found that castrated men live longer. In this case, the eunuchs were high-status men working in the royal court, and they were compared to intact men of similar status and background.
Good pull! Both the Court study and the institutional study mentioned in your site compared like-for-like as much as was possible at the time, and still came up with a significant difference in lifespan between castrated and non-castrated males.
Wasn’t there a poster here in the past year that started about a dozen different threads on the subject of having his testicles removed, to ensure that he couldn’t father a child, in order to permanently avoid the possibility of child support claims?
Fair points. As far as I know, the comparison was not court eunuchs versus male population at large (for which there would in any event not have been good records of vital statistics) but court eunuchs versus court officials who were not eunuchs, so lifestyle, prosperity, etc factors would be similar. And the comparison based on mental asylum records is between castrated inmates and inmates not castrated so, again, a lot of the other potential variables are evened out.
But, no, I don’t have cites to the studies concerned, but thanks to cwthree for doing the heavy lifing there. What I poste earlier was based on my recollection of stuff I read in the past.
It is worth noting that men generally have shorter lifespans than women, and it is sometimes suggested that there are endrocrinological reasons for this; some of the hormones produced by men accelerate the aging process. If this is correct, then it wouldn’t be surprising to find that castration would tend to increase lifespan.
One of the problems with research in this area is the ethical one; it’s hard to conduct a controlled experiment. I accept that data from oriental courts or American lunatic asylums may be unsatisfactory, but as regard studying populations of castrated humans it’s all we have or are likely to have. Another line of investigation might be to examine populations of castrated mammals. If we find that this does (or doesn’t) increase lifespan in other mammal species, and if we have good accounts of why this might be so, we could then perhaps draw inferences about the effects on humans.
I think it’s accepted that castration does have other medical consequences, though these are less significant than lifespan. Castrated men rarely or never go bald, and their body hair does not diminish with age. Castrated men have a greater tendency to gynaecomastia (enlarged breasts). As Senegoid has pointed out, they are at increased risk of osteoporosis.
